COMM2497

Exploring Asian Popular

Culture (T1 2023)
What’s happening today?
• Discuss popular culture as an ordinary, but critical phenomenon for
identity and communication.
• Describe and apply range of theoretical perspectives associated
with the study of pop culture and everyday life.

• ACTIVITY: Test your knowledge by explaining the content from

one of the videos through an appropriate theory.
• Key reading: “Saigon Style: Middle-Class Culture and
Transformations of Urban Lifestyling in Post-Reform Vietnamese
Media” (Earl, 2013).

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Review: culture as
“ordinary”

• Since Raymond Williams

proclaimed that culture “expresses
certain meanings and values not
only in art, but also in institutions
and ordinary behavior” (Williams
2001: 57), the usual hierarchical
categories of culture
(mass/high/folk) have become
blurred…
…in other words, culture is
ordinary rather than elite!

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 The Great Wave Off
Review: culture as Kanagawa (Hokusai, 1831)
in currency & meme form
“ordinary”
(Japanese context)

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The relationship between culture, identity,
and communication
Culture, Identity, & Communication

Two key terms:

Gemeinschaft &
Gesellschaft, loosely
translated as community
and society, one is
characterized by affectual
and/or traditional ties and
the other by weak or
consensual/contractual
ties (Weber 1968 [1921]).
Vietnamese families during Tet, an
example of Gemeinschaft

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Culture, Identity, & Communication
Both communities and societies are
supported by:
• Cultural Memory, which “preserves
the store of knowledge from which a
group derives an awareness of its
unity and peculiarity” (Assmann
1995, p. 130).
• Collective (also referred to as
Communicative) Memory, which is
Hai Bà Trưng, an example
is based on everyday
of cultural memory
communications and the
constitution of oral histories.

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Collective & Cultural Memory
• Cultural memory differs from
collective memory in two
ways:
• Cultural memory focuses on
deeply integrated &
established cultural
characteristics.
• “Cultural memory’s function is
to unify and stabilize a
common identity that spans
many generations, and it is
not easy to change, as
opposed to collective memory
that has a three-generation Art exhibitions commemorating a recent past
would be an example of collective memory
cycle” (Flitouris, 2014). (link)

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Collective or Cultural Memory?

2019 AFF Women’s

ASEAN Championship

Ho Chi Minh’s 1945 speech

in Ba Đình Square

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Collective/Cultural Memory and
Popular Culture
• Popular culture artifacts can be
considered “vehicles of
memory,” as they draw from a
community or society’s
collective and cultural memories
Examples: Japanese occupation
of Korea in The Handmaiden
(Park Chan-wook, 2016) and
1940s-1960s Vietnam in The
Scent of the Green Papaya (Trần
Anh Hùng, 1993).

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Collective/Cultural Memory and
Popular Culture
• Popular culture artifacts, as
communicating vessels, play a key
role in both establishing and
reinforcing a community and
society’s cultural identity.
• Cultural identity: “is based on the
distinctiveness or specificity of a
given community, encompassing
certain characteristics common to
its people” (Karjalainen 2020).
• “Cultural identity, characterized as
the membership to a cultural group,
is not an intrinsic property of Discussion: How does Spirited
persons, but is a relational social
property, as it is developed and Away (Miyazaki, 2002) communicate
maintained in relation to cultural
groups” (Heersmink 2021). Japanese cultural identity?

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Is it likely that all members of
communities and societies will interpret
and understand their cultural memory,
collective memory, and cultural identity in
the same way?
Collective/Cultural Memory and
Popular Culture
• Fiske (1992) and de Certeau
(1988) show how culture and the
use of ‘cultural artifacts’ (like
literature, music, fashion, cinema,
and television) shape social
cohesion and relations.
• Discussion: apply the above
statement to the knowledge and
enjoyment of music authored by
Trịnh Công Sơn.
• Hint: consider generational differences!

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Popular culture as expression
• While culture is ‘ordinary,’
hierarchical distinctions persist in
everyday discourse, folk culture is
still considered ‘authentic,’ high
culture is still considered sacred,
and mass culture is widely
considered ‘disposable.’
• The study of popular culture and
its relationship to cultural identity
is, by extension, the study of
‘taste.’
• Key terms: habitus (link),
cultural capital, and social field

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Popular culture as expression
Habitus: “a subjective but not
individual system of internalized
structures, schemes of perception,
conception, and action common to all
members of the same group or class”
(Bourdieu 1977, p. 86).
In lay terms: our habitus explains how
we acquire an understanding social
expectations which govern our
everyday actions. These are learned
through social institutions (like schools,
families, and work environments).
The habitus shows how some ideas
and practices, like our interpretation
and adherence to gender norms, are
accepted as neutral or natural (pre-
cultural/objective).
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Popular culture as expression
• Cultural Capital: the social assets of
a person (education, intellect, style of
speech, style of dress) that
promote social mobility in
a stratified society.
• Cultural capital can be acquired, to
a varying extent, depending on the
period, the society, and the social
class, in the absence of any
deliberate inculcation, and therefore
quite unconsciously.
• Question: does Đen Vâu or a
Vietnamese calligrapher have
cultural capital? How do you know?
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Popular culture as expression
• “Cultural capital can exist in three forms:
• he embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-
lasting dispositions of the mind and body;

• the objectified state, in the form of cultural

goods (pictures, books, dictionaries,
instruments, machines, etc.), which are the
trace or realization of theories or critiques of
these theories, problematics, etc.;

• the institutionalized state, a form of

objectification which must be set apart
because, as will be seen in the case of
educational qualifications, it confers entirely
original properties on the cultural capital which
it is presumed to guarantee”

(Bourdieu 1986, p. 18).

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Popular culture as expression
Social Field: Bourdieu argued that
people exist within and move between
different (social) fields, and that one’s
ability to move within that field involves
an interplay of their habitus and
acknowledgeable cultural capital.
In lay terms: each social field is
organized and maintained by understood
power hierarchies and relationships.
Discussion: choose a social field and
provide an example of how you express
yourself in an effort to receive cultural Example: for Generation Z, choosing to
capital. support local and sustainable fashion
brands can bestow a person with
cultural capital
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In a Vietnamese popular culture context,
what other ‘social fields’ ought we be
cognizant of?
Key reading: ‘Saigon Style’ (Earl 2013)
• In the Vietnamese context, magazines and print
media have been used to promote the middleclass
mother/housewife as an ‘ideal citizen’ (Pettus 2003).
• Exemplars for others: “in Vietnam, working-class
imitation of middle-class ways of life enables a wider
exposure to, and greater welcoming of, the state’s
world-view” (Earl 2013, p. 88).
• Back to Bourdieu: “the family, school and mass
media work to shape individuals according to
legitimate models of social convention recognized by
everyone within the limits of a particular society” (Earl
2013, p. 92).
• “The magazine functions as an instruction manual for
everyday life, and promotes a combination of
traditional values (filial piety, maternal devotion,
marital faithfulness) and rational-scientific standards
(nutrition, hygiene, economic discipline, good
parenting) associated with the government’s ideal of
a modern nuclear family” (Earl 2013, p. 90).

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Closing activity: barbershops,
bicycles, and street art/graffiti
• Link to Videos
• In each of these
respective professions or
practices, how is
cultural capital
acquired? Consider the
connection with habitus
& social fields.
• Is their cultural capital
influenced by a set of
cultural identities? How
so?

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Closing Summation
• Review: culture is ‘ordinary’ (meaning it is not reserved for elites)
• Irrespective of our relationships (communal or societal), cultural
artefacts act as “vehicles of memory,” which bind us together.
• Although popular culture artefacts communicate cultural identity,
this process is negotiated by individual people and groups based
on their established habitus, possession of cultural capital, and
position in social fields.
• The ‘state’ and other institutional forms are key to the
development of habitus and influence one’s interpretation and
understanding of the beliefs and practices that can provide one
with cultural capital.

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